Translations

by Carola

The first two Daisy Dalrymple mysteries have now come out in Hungarian. They have used the UK covers, but the titles are in Hungarian, of course.

 This is Death at Wentwater Court. I'm told it translates roughly as Daisy and the Frozen Don Juan. Which is all very well, but makes it liable to be confused with Fall of a Philanderer--though that takes place in summer...

 This is The Winter Garden Mystery. The translation is more or less Daisy and the Garden of Mystery. Fair enough.

 The German translations of Daisy had titles on a pattern similar to the Hungarian--they were all Miss Daisy und...  Most were perfectly acceptable but one actually gave away one of what you might call the inner mysteries, not whodunnit but to whom it was done. Maddening.

Some of the Polish titles were pretty strange. Gone West came out as the Mystery of the Empty Notebook. No empty notebook in that story.

Die Laughing is something like Torture Me with Laughter. It sounds as if the victim was tickled to death, which he wasn't.

I've been told the the translations of the actual text are pretty bad, but I guess they sold well in spite of it. Perhaps Polish readers are used to reading bad translations of foreign books and make allowances.


The only translations of my books that I've been able to read for myself were a few Regencies that came out in French. They were readable but had serious trouble when it came to the language of the period. I guess I shouldn't have written puns in Regency English.

The one above all that I would really like to be able to read is the Hebrew translation of Mayhem and Miranda. I can't believe they changed my innocuous story sufficiently to justify this cover: